Iirc it has not been proven that t.gondii causes behavioral change in humans.

But it definitely causes behavioral abnormalities in rodents in suppressing their natural fleeing and fear response to cats. The parasite has evolved this mechanism because it can only reproduce inside of cats.

Hearing things like this from people who are above all scrupulous and civil to a fault means that it must be bad enough that nothing will change sans a change in leadership:

The reason why Monica was fired has been out and clear. She had a different view point from what the director of Q&A had, and was therefore thrown out like street garbage. The director has repeatedly demonstrated that they don't care about the community's feelings. There used to be a time when users were free to oppose whatever the company had done, and were able to remain on the site. But in the past few days, the Stack Exchange staff have tried to take down posts on MSE and Stack Moderators teams which were focused on the resignations, and suspended a user for posting that. — Bhargav Rao8 hours ago

They kicked a mod because of a future change, and another left because of a plain awful practice I can't believe exists. Most of the other mods who left build on one or both of those (but mainly on the mod who got kicked). There's still a mysterious change coming some time in the future that we may or may not get a vague answer to some time in 6-8 weeks

@PrincessOlivia From reading Aza’s post and some comments under this thread, my guess is that their and Monica’s departures are related but on opposite sides of the coin. That is, Aza’s resignation sparked some CoC change that Monica dissented from as the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction, and voicing these concerns got her dismissed. I say this because Aza’s note paints other mods in a poor light, and directionally points in the same direction as TPTB have forcefully pushed the CoC in the last few years. I expect SE will announce the CoC changes in this light. — Dan Bron17 hours ago

When I resigned, I frankly did not expect that my resignation would become related to an occurrence of these proportions. It's difficult for me to discern what happened with Monica, because my resignation predates her termination. Instead of adding fuel to this fire, I wanted to thank you for differentiating our departures so clearly, rather than rolling them together or directly implicating mine as a cause-and-effect as some might. It lets me go in peace, for which I am grateful. — Aza14 hours ago

The company I used to work for wanted to drastically change directions. They had one big problem though: they had an entire workforce that was used to working the old way (in-house versus hired out) and resented any and all change. So... they acted like complete bastards and that made people angry enough to trigger an exodus. Today it's a healthy profitable company with 90% of the workforce replaced with new people.

I can't help but notice that similar things are happening on Stack Overflow...

I could be wrong but I suspect that a good deal of SO's profit is expected to be from corporate deals. The subscription a large corporation pays equals the commission charged from selling many many individual developers on stackoverflow jobs. :p

@jpmc26 I trust that everybody in this room is mature enough not to take wild offence to an obvious real-world parallel and start throwing pitchforks - if I'm wrong about that, I'll rescind the comment.

(In case you're unaware, deflection by diverting the media's attention is a well-known political technique, famously a skill of the President's. That's neither a criticism of him nor a compliment.)

In general, this whole fiasco doesn't mean the same rules don't still apply to the room as well. There are mods in here, who will keep the peace if necessary, and room owners. But I don't expect it to become a problem.

All I know so far is that several people whom I trust and would not blink trusting on more contentious matters then this who have been party to the dispute have made the judgement that the company gravely mishandled it

@StoryTeller If I'm speaking honestly, I don't think she really thought through the consequences. She believes she's in the right, and when your attitude is to demand acceptance from everyone, you don't really think about whether your words make that easier or harder for other people.

Is this the long fallout from having SE sites about politics, religion and interpersonal skills, by trying to run them like sites for impersonal technical matters? Intolerant remarks about (for example) sexuality and religious beliefs are not obviously off topic, not-nice, noise, but the very subject?

@Raedwald No. It's the long fallout from having SE the company decide it wants to exert its influence to "fix" sociopolitical problems. They announced they were going to start doing so in the wake of "Time to Take a Stand."

Honestly, I am surprised and disappointed this answer is duplicated across the network. It's a little dismissive. No answer would be better than a copy and pasted answer. I would strongly recommend getting someone with more good will within the community to make these posts. — Yvette Colomb42 secs ago

@SébastienRenauld You objectively lose less by saying nothing until you have something to say that people will accept. If you don't say anything, you always have the chance to reconcile by saying something later. When you double down on something your listeners have already rejected without offering anything to change their minds, you lose the battle completely.

@YvetteColomb it's worse than just dismissive. It throws shade at a third party, thinly veiled as a "we're sorry for your inconvenience" answer on the announcement of a mod stepping down in the aftermath

@JohnDvorak No, I'm referring to when she replied to Tim's post about Hot Meta going away. Where she contradicted him and expressed her ideology on "niceness." She clearly wasn't ordered to do so. Why would the company tell her to contradict Tim?

@jpmc26 I think that was her way of standing up for her employees. It just doesn't work on meta. People cannot demand respect. People need to earn the trust of the community before putting out heated statements

I’d like to add some context to the “why” we are doing it. Tim, kindly, wanted to shield me from ire, however, in taking this job I signed up for this. I'd like to come here, own my decision, and deliver this feedback.
Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know th...

SE behavior, then meta enforced change to not possible to follow with the comments deletion and multiple chat rooms had already made my decision, this last behavior from SE has just pushed me to just drop the ball totally

Honestly, I'm just praying for a replacement. If something similar to SO with a few changes to handle the way information ages and better focus on curation were to spring up, I'd be gone in a heartbeat.

"Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know they will need to post something to Meta." ... may I ask why? I had quite a few people calling me because my posts on 2 websites (one forum, one social media), one was even from overseas. Do I panic? No.

@AndrasDeak If the goal is, "Don't treat people like crap," sure. There's no contradiction there. I have no problem with that. I bought into that wholeheartedly when I believed that was what SO's Be Nice policy meant. (You can go back and read my plea over "Time to Take a Stand" if you want proof of that.) But it's gone far, far, beyond that and become, "Let's fix the racial and sex disparities," and, "It's your fault that there are disparities for not being nice enough."

@YvetteColomb It's not laughable. That was actually fantastic. But it is worth noting that when they did it, it was explicitly not with the intention of trying to help long time users, but with the intent to measure whether it helped askers.

@JohnDvorak Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting we ignore whatever comes or that we just abandon the site wholesale right now without another place to even go. But I also don't think there's any use in having expectations of something that is highly unlikely.